The Birth of Windows Live Hotmail
Literally! It was built from ground zero.
Liveside reports:
Richard Sim, Senior Product Manager for Windows Live Hotmail posts an interesting and comprehensive list of what the Hotmail team has accomplished since starting the project almost two and a half years ago. As he says, “(t)he UI and features that are visible to end users only scratch the surface of what we’ve done”. Sim’s list:
* rearchitected the entire service from scratch,
* swapped out the backend storage infrastructure (literally swapping out old boxes for new ones)
* instrumented user actions,
* created new ways to serve advertisements,
* developed new advertising products,
* created a scalable and flexible mail platform to power email for universities and other partners,
* managed a large scale beta process with a continuous user feedback loop,
* redesigned our product development and deployment processes,
* streamlined our signup flows,
* opened up Outlook client access for ALL free users (coming very soon),
* created a Windows Live Contacts (subscribe to contact updates) service,
* created a new selection paradigm for email client applications (dynamic checkboxes) which has been eventually adopted by Yahoo Mail Beta,
* and released a new safety bar to educate users about the context of every mail that arrives in his/her inbox
“Oh, and of course, rewrote the entire UI and released dozens of great features.”
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